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Video 2. Dr Quantum - Flatland


I. Before watching the video:
1. What do you think the video will be about?
Last year Math Proffesor Recht commented about a video named "Flatland". In that video there was a flat world, a word in two dimesions, where population were geometric common shapes in plane, and they were more important in society acording the number of sides of each shape; thus, triangles were less important and less powerful than squares, and these were less important than hexagonal polygons, and so for.

2. What do you think "flatland" means?
If the video is refered to what I think it is, Flatland is the name and the main characteristic of that world. A "Flatland" would be a plane, a bidimensional world.


II. Now click on the following link and watch the video. While watching, please answer the following questions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWyTxCsIXE4&feature=related

-Who are the main characters in the video?
A circle in Flatland wich becomes an sphere, and the human explainig the dimensions to the circle, whose name I guessed is Dr. Quantum, because it is written in the title of the video, but it is never said.

-What's the difference between the worlds in which the characters live in?
Difference is the quantity of dimensions they know and understand, that make characters comprehend their worlds in different ways.

-What does Dr. Quantum decide to do?
To show the circle the three dimensional world, Dr. Quantum decides to bring the circle out of his plane to three dimensional world, so it can see its own world from a different perspective.

-What does this cause to the other character?
When the circle is taken out from Flatland, it becomes an sphere. And the sphere was surprised about what it was seeing and knowing.

III. After watching the video, please answer these questions.
-How many dimensions do you know? Please mention them and define them.
We all live in a world with three dimensions: up and down, backward and forward, left and rigth, or, in other words, depth, length and width. We might define lenght as the dimension that allows us to notice a difference between what is in front of us or behind of us. Width might be defined as the dimension that allows us to describe at which side of us are thing positioned, right or left. Depth might be defined as the dimension that allows us to recognize if things are under us or above us. In any case, these definitions are not strict, they all depend on the position of the observer: what you can see in front of you is not longer in front if you lay on the floor.
Mathematicians also usually need to think about spaces at four o even more dimensions, but until know we can only imagine them, and describe them using some properties we figure it they must have, but we do not completely know them.

Good


-Would you like to live in a two dimensional world? Why?
I guess that if a two dimensional world were everything I knew, I would be used to it, as I am to our three dimensional world. But if I knew three dimensional world and then I lived in a two dimensional one, it would be very difficult to me to stop looking everywhere, maybe it would be awful to look upside and do not see the sky or a roof. I think I would not like it, actually, I can not even imagine how would people be like and how different would anything else look.

I agree...